The Best Paint Protection Film – XPEL

The XPEL Ultimate Plus paint protective film (also known as PPF or Clear Bra) features a super optically clear film with self-healing and stain resistant properties for the ultimate protection for your car. It is superelastic and can be stretched to easily over complex curves so you can cover your entire car without wrinkles and excessive seams.

Our Project Corvette Stingray C7 Z51 started off as a new car fresh from the dealership, judging from the production date, the car had sat on the dealer’s lot for more than a year before they sold the car to us at a hell of a good price. That year of outdoor weathering with little care had already taken its toll on the cars black paint. It suffered from etched in hard water stains and bad swirl marks. When detailing the car, we could get these paint defects to disappear but being a black car, they would soon reappear.

Our car also seemed to suffer from soft factory paint, a few road trips and track sessions for testing had already started to abrade the paint on the cars leading edges. To prevent more damage and to help keep our car looking good, we decided that we needed some paint protecting film. We turned to XPEL who provided some of their revolutionary Ultimate Plus film.

The film is constructed of a clear layer, 0.0005″ thick. The revolutionary clear layer is super high gloss and dirt and contaminants have a hard time sticking to it. The clear layer is hard and resists scratching and swirl marks but the most amazing thing is its self-healing properties. The clear can actually heal swirl marks and minor scratching by parking in the hot sun, blowing hot air on it via a heat gun or by pouring hot water on it!

Under the clear is a polyurethane layer 0.006″ thick. This is a tough thick layer that provides cushioning and protection to the paint and bodywork from severe abrasion and impacts. Finally, the last layer is a durable acrylic adhesive which holds the film down, allows it to be moved around during installation and does not stain paint when removed for repairs and patch jobs.

To top it all off, the XPEL Ultimate Plus protective paint film protects your car from harsh ultra-violet radiation and is backed by a 10-year warranty including labor costs for yellowing, peeling, hazing, and cracking! With this, it was a no-brainer to get our Corvette’s thin and soft factory paint protected. We covered our entire car.

We had our XPEL Ultimate Plus film installed by Koosha Satvat from Pinnacle Film Protection. Koosha is a one-man operation at the moment and he’s also mobile–so he comes to you for maximum convenience!Our shop was a little too dusty for him to come to us so we arranged a few days we could leave the car at a friend of MotoIQ, Daley Visual in Corona, California.We thought we did a good job prepping the paint by clay barring and buffing it before getting our XPEL paint protection but Koosha found a number of areas that needed a little extra work before he could start.

The XPEL film will hide most small paint scratches and swirl marks but it’s best to remove as many of them as possible beforehand. Here Koosha hand polished a few spots on the bumper, hood, and fenders.

The emblems have to be removed before filming and then replaced once the film is applied. Here Koosha applies blue tape to protect the paint from being scratched when the emblem is pried up.

Curly’s Corner: 2018 Canadian & French Grand Prixs

7 comments

this seems excessively long for an article, especially after the first few pages it felt very repetitive. The beauty shots on the last page show the amazing quality of his work and it is perfection, I just feel that the article could have been half the pages and still given us a good idea of how the process goes.

it varies by car but to cover ALL the painted surfaces and aero on a C7 like we did you’re probably going to spend $6,000. just a a front end kit covering the bumper, hood, mirrors, front fenders and rocker panels is around $3,000. Yes, it may seem like an excessively long article but the process took 4 ENTIRE days to complete.. The difference is in the details. I never appreciated how much work goes into one of these wraps till I had to sit there and watch Koosha do it. We’ve wrapped a few of our project cars and none of them have been done this well.